The present invention relates to a method and system for forecasting the demand for products from the fluctuation trend of sales results on the basis of the sales results of products, and a recording medium in which is recorded a computer program for demand forecasting.
In the manufacturing and distributing industries, always supplying products in response to the demand of consumers by a minimum stock to reduce the stock cost and distribution expenses will lead to reduction of the sales unit price of products and enhancement of the profit rate. It is therefore necessary to forecast the product demand precisely, and determine the sales plan, production plan, and distribution plan according to the demand trend of consumers.
In a conventional system for forecasting the product demand and determining the sales plan, on the basis of characteristics of the sales results, including the sales demand of individual products, component ratio of the sales, and profit rate, the index showing ease of sales promotion of individual products is calculated by a fuzzy operation where the knowledge (rule) of an expert in sales plan about analysis of fluctuation trend of sales results is utilized, and the sales forecasting result of individual products on the basis of this index is displayed, so that the user interface for determining the sales plan efficiently is presented (Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 5-151234).
In another proposed system, the sales amount of each product is collected from a sample shop extracted from plural shops, the sales amount in all shops is presumed from the sales amount in the sample shop on the basis of the sales amount ratio in the sample shop to the sales amount in all shops and the characteristics of commodities of the sample shop (price zone, target customer age, selling technique etc.), while sales transition patterns of plural types and final sales estimated amount on the basis of the past transition of sales results are stored, and a pattern similar to the estimated transition pattern of sales amount of all shops is selected from the stored sales transition patterns, and the final sales estimated amount is regarded as the sales estimated amount of the commodities, and the production is planned accordingly (Japanese Patent Publication No. 8-16950).
Thus, in the conventional methods of forecasting the demand by analyzing the trend of the past sales results, it is the main goal to apply the statistical analysis techniques, such as time series forecasting where algorithm of forecasting the knowledge and condition of analysis of fluctuation trend of sales results are described in a form of rule, and econometric modeling.
However, if the product trend changes in a short cycle, as often experienced recently, the data used in analysis rapidly becomes old and the precision of forecasting lowers. Therefore, in order to keep a high precision in forecasting, the maintenance of software of the above-mentioned algorithm, knowledge and condition is required frequently. It, however, demands a long time and expertness to describe the techniques of forecasting in a form of rule depending on abundant experiences and intuition of an expert, and hence the maintenance must depend on experts and is difficult.